The House of Thunder (3 page)

Or worse yet—what if she had awakened to find herself paralyzed from the neck down, condemned to a life of utter dependency? What if she’d had to be fed and dressed and taken to the bathroom by paid attendants for the rest of her life?

She shivered.

“No,” she told Viteski. “I can’t have lost that much time. I
can’t
have. There must be some mistake.”

“Surely you’ve noticed how thin you are,” Viteski said. “You’ve dropped fifteen pounds or more.”

She held up her arms. Like two sticks. Earlier, she had realized how frightfully thin they looked, but she hadn’t wanted to think about what that meant.

“You’ve been getting fluids intravenously, of course,” Dr. Viteski said. “Otherwise, you’d have died of dehydration long ago. There’s been some nourishment in the fluids you’ve gotten, primarily glucose. But you’ve had no real food—no solid food, that is—in more than three weeks.”

Susan was five-foot-five, and her ideal weight (considering her delicate bone structure) was about a hundred and ten pounds. At the moment she weighed between ninety and ninety-five, and the effect of the loss was dramatic. She put her hands on the blanket, and even through the covers she could feel how sharp and bony her hips were.

“Twenty-two days,” she said wonderingly.

At last, reluctantly, she accepted the unacceptable.

When she stopped resisting the truth, her headache and her extreme weariness returned. As limp as a bundle of wet straw, she fell back against the pillows.

“That’s enough for now,” Viteski said. “I think I’ve let you talk too much. You’ve tired yourself unnecessarily. Right now you need plenty of rest.”

“Rest?” she said. “No. For God’s sake, I’ve
been
resting for twenty-two days!”

“There’s no genuine rest when you’re in a coma,” Viteski said. “It isn’t the same thing as normal sleep. Rebuilding your strength and stamina is going to take a while.”

He picked up the control switch, pushed one of the four buttons, and lowered the head of the bed.

“No,” Susan said, suddenly panicky. “Wait. Please, wait a minute.”

He ignored her protests and put the bed all the way down.

She hooked her hands around the rails and tried to pull herself into a sitting position, but for the moment she was too exhausted to lift herself.

“You don’t expect me to go to sleep, do you?” she asked, although she couldn’t deny that she needed sleep. Her eyes were grainy, hot, and tired. Her eyelids felt as heavy as lead.

“Sleep is precisely what you need most,” he assured her.

“But I
can’t.”

“You look as if you can,” he said. “You’re plainly worn out. And no wonder.”

“No, no. I mean, I don’t
dare
go to sleep. What if I don’t wake up?”

“Of course you will.”

“What if I slip into another coma?”

“You won’t.”

Frustrated by his inability to understand her fear, Susan gritted her teeth and said, “But what if I
do
?”

“Listen, you can’t go through life being afraid to sleep,” Viteski said slowly, patiently, as if he were reasoning with a small child. “Just relax. You’re out of the coma. You’re going to be fine. Now, it’s quite late, and I need a bite of dinner and some sleep myself. Just relax. All right? Relax.”

If this is his best bedside manner, Susan thought, then what is he like when he isn’t
trying
to be nice?

He went to the door.

She wanted to cry out:
Don’t leave me alone!
But her strong streak of self-reliance would not permit her to behave like a frightened child. She didn’t want to lean on Dr. Viteski or on anyone else.

“Get your rest,” he said. “Everything’ll look better in the morning.”

He turned out the overhead light.

Shadows sprang up as if they were living creatures that had been hiding under the furniture and behind the baseboard. Although Susan couldn’t remember ever having been afraid of the dark, she was uneasy now; her heartbeat accelerated.

The only illumination was the cold, shimmering fluorescence that came through the open door from the hospital corridor, and the soft glow from a small lamp that stood on a table in one corner of the room.

Standing in the doorway, Viteski was starkly silhouetted by the hall light. His face was no longer visible; he looked like a black paper cutout. “Good night,” he said.

He closed the door behind him, shutting out the corridor light altogether.

There was only one lamp now, no more than a single fifteen-watt bulb. The darkness crowded closer to Susan, laid long fingers across the bed.

She was alone.

She looked at the other bed, which was shrouded in shadows like banners of black crepe; it reminded her of a funeral bier. She wished ardently for a roommate.

This isn’t right, she thought. I shouldn’t be left alone like this. Not after I’ve just come out of a coma. Surely there ought to be somebody in attendance—a nurse, an orderly,
somebody.

Her eyes were heavy, incredibly heavy.

No, she told herself angrily. I mustn’t fall asleep. Not until I’m absolutely sure that my nice little nap won’t turn into another twenty-two-day coma.

For a few minutes Susan struggled against the ever-tightening embrace of sleep, clenching her fists so that her fingernails dug painfully into her palms. But her eyes burned and ached, and at last she decided that it wouldn’t hurt to close them for just a minute, just long enough to rest them. She was sure she could close her eyes without going to sleep. Of course she could. No problem.

She fell over the edge of sleep as if she were a stone dropping into a bottomless well.

She dreamed.

In the dream, she was lying on a hard, damp floor in a vast, dark, cold place. She wasn’t alone.
They
were with her. She ran, staggering blindly across the lightless room, down narrow corridors of stone, fleeing from a nightmare that was, in fact, a memory of a real place, a real time, a real horror that she had lived through when she was nineteen.

The House of Thunder.

3

The following morning, a few minutes after Susan woke, the plump, gray-haired nurse appeared. As before, her glasses were suspended from a beaded chain around her neck, and they bobbled on her motherly bosom with each step she took. She slipped a thermometer under Susan’s tongue, took hold of Susan’s wrist, timed the pulse, then put on her glasses to read the thermometer. As she worked, she kept up a steady line of chatter. Her name was Thelma Baker. She said she’d always known that Susan would pull through eventually. She had been a nurse for thirty-five years, first in San Francisco and then here in Oregon, and she had seldom been wrong about a patient’s prospects for recovery. She said she was such a natural-born nurse that she sometimes wondered if she was the reincarnation of a woman who had been a first-rate nurse in a previous life. “Of course, I’m not much good at anything
else,
” she said with a hearty laugh. “I’m sure as the devil not much of a housekeeper!” She said she wasn’t very good at managing money, either; to hear her tell it, just balancing the checkbook every month was a Herculean task. Wasn’t much good at marriage, she said. Two husbands, two divorces, no children. Couldn’t cook very well, either. Hated to sew;
loathed
it. “But I’m a darned good nurse and proud of it,” she said emphatically, more than once, always with that charming smile that involved her brown eyes as well as her mouth, a smile that showed how much she truly did enjoy her work.

Susan liked the woman. Ordinarily, she had little or no patience with nonstop talkers. But Mrs. Baker’s chatter was amusing, frequently self-deprecating, and oddly soothing.

“Hungry?” Mrs. Baker asked.

“Starved.” She had awakened with a ravenous appetite.

“You’ll start taking solid food today,” Mrs. Baker said. “A soft diet, of course.”

Even as the nurse spoke, a young, blond, male orderly arrived with breakfast: cherry-flavored Jell-O, unbuttered toast with a single spoonful of grape jelly, and a thin, chalky-looking tapioca. To Susan, no other meal had ever been so appealing. But she was disappointed by the size of the portions, and she said as much.

“It doesn’t look like a lot,” Mrs. Baker said, “but believe me, honey, you’ll be stuffed before you’ve eaten half of it. Remember, you haven’t taken solid food in three weeks. Your stomach’s all shrunk up. It’ll be a while before you’ll have a normal appetite.”

Mrs. Baker left to attend to other patients, and before long Susan realized that the nurse was right. Although there wasn’t a great deal of food on the tray, and although even this simple fare tasted like ambrosia, it was more than she could eat.

As she ate, she thought about Dr. Viteski. She still felt that he had been wrong to let her alone, unattended. In spite of Mrs. Baker’s sprightly manner, the hospital still seemed cold, unfriendly.

When she could eat no more, she wiped her mouth with the paper napkin, pushed the rolling bed table out of her way—and suddenly had the feeling she was being watched. She glanced up.

He was standing in the open door: a tall, elegant man of about thirty-eight. He was wearing dark shoes, dark trousers, a white lab coat, a white shirt, and a green tie, and he was holding a clipboard in his left hand. His face was arresting, sensitive; his superbly balanced features looked as if they had been carefully chiseled from stone by a gifted sculptor. His blue eyes were as bright as polished gems, and they provided an intriguing contrast to his lustrous black hair, which he wore full and combed straight back from his face and forehead.

“Miss Thorton,” he said, “I’m delighted to see you sitting up, awake and aware.” He came to the bed. His smile was even nicer than Thelma Baker’s. “I’m your physician. Doctor McGee. Jeffrey McGee.”

He extended his hand to her, and she took it. It was a dry, hard, strong hand, but his touch was light and gentle.

“I thought Dr. Viteski was my physician.”

“He’s chief of the hospital medical staff,” McGee said, “but I’m in charge of your case.” His voice had a reassuringly masculine timbre, yet it was pleasingly soft and soothing. “I was the admitting physician when you were brought into the emergency room.”

“But yesterday, Dr. Viteski—”

“Yesterday was my day off,” McGee said. “I take two days off from my private practice every week, but only one day off from my hospital rounds—only
one
day, mind you—so of course you chose that day. After you laid there like a stone for twenty-two days, after you worried me sick for twenty-two days, you had to come out of your coma when I wasn’t here.” He shook his head, pretending to be both astonished and hurt. “I didn’t even find out about it until this morning.” He frowned at her with mock disapproval. “Now, Miss Thorton,” he teased, “if there are going to be any medical miracles involving my patients, I insist on being present when they occur, so that I can take the credit and bask in the glory. Understood?”

Susan smiled up at him, surprised by his lighthearted manner. “Yes, Dr. McGee. I understand.”

“Good. Very good. I’m glad we got that straightened out.” He grinned. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Better,” she said.

“Ready for an evening of dancing and bar-hopping?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“It’s a date.” He glanced at her breakfast tray. “I see you’ve got an appetite.”

“I tried to eat everything, but I couldn’t.”

“That’s what Orson Welles said.”

Susan laughed.

“You did pretty well,” he said, indicating the tray. “You’ve got to start off with small, frequent meals. That’s to be expected. Don’t worry too much about regaining your strength. Before you know it, you’ll be making a pig of yourself, and you’ll be well along the road to recovery. Feeling headachy this morning? Drowsy?”

“No. Neither.”

“Let me take your pulse,” he said, reaching for her hand.

“Mrs. Baker took it just before breakfast.”

“I know. This is just an excuse to hold hands with you.”

Susan laughed again. “You’re different from most doctors.”

“Do you think a physician should be businesslike, distant, somber, humorless?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Do you think I should try to be more like Dr. Viteski?”

“Definitely not.”

“He iz an egg-cellent doktor,” McGee said, doing a perfect imitation of Viteski’s accented voice.

“I’m sure he is. But I suspect you’re even better.”

“Thank you. The compliment is duly noted and has earned you a small discount off my final bill.”

He was still holding her hand. He finally looked at his watch and took her pulse.

“Will I live?” she asked when he finished.

“No doubt about it. You’re bouncing back fast.” He continued to hold her hand as he said, “Seriously now, I think a little humor between doctor and patient is a good thing. I believe it helps the patient maintain a positive attitude, and a positive attitude speeds healing. But some people don’t
want
a cheerful doctor. They want someone who acts as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders. It makes them feel more secure. So if my joking bothers you, I can tone it down or turn it off. The important thing is that you feel comfortable and confident about the care you’re getting.”

“You go right ahead and be as cheerful as you want,” Susan said. “My spirits need lifting.”

“There’s no reason to be glum. The worst is behind you now.”

He squeezed her hand gently before finally letting go of it.

To her surprise, Susan felt a tug of regret that he had released her hand so soon.

“Dr. Viteski tells me there are lapses in your memory,” he said.

She frowned. “Fewer than there were yesterday. I guess it’ll all come back to me sooner or later. But there are still a lot of holes.”